Bouncing around the net this morning I was wondering what ever happened to Patrick Nagel, the iconic artist who severely damaged lots of us young men with his minimalistic depictions of women that no girlfriend would ever live up to. Back in the early 80’s his work was ubiquitous, but he suddenly disappeared. I always thought that he had simply fallen out of fashion, but it turns out he was a victim of an ironic death.
How so? Well, he apparently participated in a celebrity fund raiser for the American Heart Association called the “Aerobathon” in which he did aerobics for 15 minutes. He was later found dead of a heart attack in his car. Not bad for a 38 year old.
And here I thought nobody could compete with Jim Fixx.
Dev, the little woman, and I haven’t had the chance to go out for movie night in a while so last night was an extra treat for me. I was looking forward to seeing The Golden Compass as it was ever since what’s-his-putz started whining about it, and having started the third book of the His Dark Materials trilogy yesterday I was really set to go see it.
Since I’m not much of a critic I can’t give a whole lot of insight beyond the fact that I really enjoyed the movie and hope it does well. Visually I couldn’t have been more pleased, the acting was solid, and they followed the story pretty well. Yeah, they re-arranged stuff a bit, but you have to do that when you don’t want a three hour long movie. So, yeah, movie great, but as per usual I think the book is better. But that’s OK…the book is always better.
Since I first started playing City of Heroes I thought that the Blasters really needed some love. Why? Well, honestly their base special ability, defiance, sucked all possible ass. As you took more damage you would deal more damage. This sounded like a good idea on paper but it just never worked out. First of all in order to get it to do much of anything you had to be down to about 25% of your health. To have a serious effect you had to be knocking on death’s door. The problem is that blasters don’t have much in the realm of hitpoints so if you got there the next shot killed you. All in all it was something you’d be lucky to ever see do anything.
But all of that has changed! They scrapped the old system and replaced it with something more sensible: a damage bonus for using your attacks in quick succession, which honestly, you do anyway.
What’s more they made it so you can still use a couple of your abilities while you are mezzed, and that takes a bit of care of the other problem. Since blasters have no defense, little to no ability to mitigate damage, and zero mezz protection (that being held, put to sleep, and stunned for those who don’t play it) your biggest problem was standing around during fights holding your head. Now you can at least knock a few shots off.
Oh yeah. Plus the 12.5% overall ranged damage bonus. I think it is about time they realized that scrappers ended up doing a lot more damage overall since range doesn’t really exist in the game as much as you would like. It isn’t like a sniper rifle can shoot half a mile or anything.
So overall they’ve finally fixed something that has been bugging me as long as I’ve played and showed some love for those who have needed it for a LOOOOONG time.
I keep hearing people harping about how since you can’t prove a negative one is always left with the position of not knowing whether or not God exists. Though the first part of this statement is indeed true, the second is not.
You see, quite simply people keep looking at this ass-backward. It isn’t that the onus is on the atheist to prove the non-existence of God for that is simply impossible, but instead the onus is on the theist to prove that God exists. To date no credible evidence has come up to prove that he does. Sure, people like to use everything in the world as some sort of proof, but at the end of the day it isn’t anything that can more simply be demonstrated as a natural phenomenon. Unless they’re taking a definitional approach and thus assuming that words such as “perfect” have some magical power in them that forces them to point to existent entities…like unicorns and perpetual motion machines. Of course my favorite argument is that the Universe couldn’t have created itself and can’t have been around forever so it must have been created by something…which they claim either created itself or has been around forever.
All said I grow tired of people harping on the whole negative proof thing because it is simply disingenuous. Atheists aren’t proving a negative…they’re simply asking for a solid piece of evidence. Just one will do. And no, the book doesn’t work since no theist believes that all of the books just like the bible, Koran, or whatnot are true…just one. And of course it is the one that their parents believed or is most prevalent in their culture, though some switch to another just to be rebellious.
Until that evidence is shown God belongs with alien visitation and bigfoot: nice stories that yet so far have no proof, and thus are not to be believed.
I have two things to say about this: HOLY SHIT. I am stunned that someone was out there doing this, but on the other hand I’m happy he got caught. I really hope that if there was indeed an accomplice (or accomplices) involved that he gets busted too. At the end of the day it is nice to see that such extreme cybercrime is being dealt with, and dealt with severely.
I can appreciate his mother’s comments on the matter, but honestly this wasn’t a mistake. It was a lot of mistakes, and big ones at that. I only hope that his victims and their families can get past what was done to them. Oh yeah…and I hope he gets kicked in the nuts at least once a day in jail. But that’s just me.
Bouncing around the net this morning I was wondering what ever happened to Patrick Nagel, the iconic artist who severely damaged lots of us young men with his minimalistic depictions of women that no girlfriend would ever live up to. Back in the early 80’s his work was ubiquitous, but he suddenly disappeared. I always thought that he had simply fallen out of fashion, but it turns out he was a victim of an ironic death.
Since I’m not much of a critic I can’t give a whole lot of insight beyond the fact that I really enjoyed the movie and hope it does well. Visually I couldn’t have been more pleased, the acting was solid, and they followed the story pretty well. Yeah, they re-arranged stuff a bit, but you have to do that when you don’t want a three hour long movie. So, yeah, movie great, but as per usual I think the book is better. But that’s OK…the book is always better.